JONAS MEKAS Interviewed by MARIANNE SHANEEN “The Creation of SOHO was 100% George Maciunas’ idea and project. I would say, George was responsible for completely transforming downtown Manhattan.” When I came to New York almost twenty years ago, the first book I read was your autobiography “I Had Nowhere To Go”. Can you tell me about the experience of being in exile, and if you have a feeling of home here? Home is where you are. That’s one interpretation. Brooklyn was originally where I landed after postwar Europe, then I moved to Manhattan, and now I am back in Brooklyn. My home, all my new friends are in Brooklyn. All the places in which I lived are still in my memory; they are pat of me. I am romantic, but I’m not sentimental about the places from which I’ve come. My childhood, Lithuania, my village, it’s all very real, and I use it as material in my work. I do not believe in remaining in one place, none of us do. We all keep moving to somewhere else and to something else. Exile. There was a period when I was thinking about exile in conventional terms, Like in “I had Nowhere To Go”. But I have transcended that. Now, I think that it was very good that I was thrown out of Lithuania. It brought me out of a small village with a provincial mentality, and threw me out into the world, and exposed me to unforeseen, unpredictable experiences and realities, which made me who I am today. If I would not have been thrown out, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I grew up in a small 20-family village, a farming family. I did not experience city life. I had just finished high school. Usually after high school you go to university, but those normal things, I did not have any of it. Suddenly I was there in Germany, together with French and Italian war prisoners in a forced labor camp. Ten years of my life was wiped out. So it was like I left Lithuania at 17, and when I landed in New York I was 27. And that’s where really my life begins, in New York. My real interest and life in cinema began on the second evening after I landed in New York, when I went to see “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” at the New York Film Society run by Rudolph Arnheim. After I landed in New York, with my brother Adolfas, every day we went to the Museum of Modern Art. We did not miss any film opening. When I look to my lists of what I saw then, those lists are the history of cinema. I also went to every new play and every new ballet… [Left to right] Jack Smith, Mario Montez, Piero Heliczer, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol at the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque for Jonas Mekas’ birthday, 1966. Photograph by Matt Hoffman. I’ve heard you say it sort of saved your life... Legendary filmmaker and video artist, poet, critic, and founder of An- ry, which Mekas and others formed in the early 70’s, to begin establishing a Yes, because, after years in the displaced person’s camps where there was nothing, then thology Film Archives, Jonas Mekas, often called the ‘godfather’ of historical canon of American avant-garde cinema. In Lithuania, Mekas was suddenly I was here in New York, I was like a dry sponge, I absorbed absolutely everything, American avant-garde cinema, turns 90 this year, and continues to indel- targeted for his anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet writing and underground activi- I wanted everything, I was open to anything and everything...there was so much...poetry ibly influence the creation, history, and reception of American culture. ties, and in New York in 1964 he was arrested on obscenity charges for readings and the Beat generation…so much. screening Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, and Jean Genet’s UnChant d’Amour . Born in a Lithuanian farming village in 1922, he landed in New York Tell me about your relationship with Fluxus artist George Maciunas - who was as a refugee in 1949 with his brother Adolfas (1925-2011), after- fleeAs a filmmaker, he is best known for his visionary “diaristic” films , such also born in, and fled, Lithuania, and came to NY at around the same time ing Soviet police, being captured and taken to a Nazi forced- asla Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost, (1975); Reminiscences of a Voyage to that you did. How was Maciunas fundamental in the emergence of SoHo as an bor camp, and being held in German displaced persons camps. Lithuania, (1972); Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol,(1990); and his five- artistic centre in New York in the 60’s? hour long diary filmAs I was Moving Ahead Occasionally I saw Brief Glimps- I met George first around l95l. In 1954, together with Adolfas, my brother, we began publishing After discovering avant-garde film and borrowing money to buy his es of Beauty, (2000) assembled from fifty years of recordings of his life. Film Culture magazine. I needed some help with designing, so I asked George to help me, first Bolex, he became intensely immersed in the thriving New York art which he did. Ours was always a working relationship. world with luminaries such as Fluxus founder George Maciunas, Andy For over twenty years, Mekas has been working primarily with vid- Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Salvador Dali, Ken- eo. Endlessly innovative, in 2007, he began his “365 Day Project”, In l967 he organized the first Fluxhouse cooperative building on 80 Wooster Street. I joined neth Anger, Harry Smith and Nam Jun Paik. Living in the Chelsea Ho- in which he created one video every single day for a year, to be the cooperative by purchasing the basement and the ground floor (total price: $8,000...), tel and in the emerging SoHo artist loft collective, he made films andviewed on the iPod and on his website: http://jonasmekasfilms.com where I began the Cinematheque screenings. George fixed up the place, designed the interior. curated film screenings of work by radical experimental filmmakers Since he had no money, I gave him one part of the basement to live and work, until 1977, that came to be known as the classic American avant-garde. A -pioHis recent Sleepless Nights Stories (2011), inspired by reading One Thou- when he had to move out of the city. Most of the Fluxus performances, and much of what is neer and iconoclast, he, with his brother Adolfas, published the first- issand and One Nights, is an episodic series of intimate vignettes of himself known today as the classic American avant-garde cinema of the Sixties, were first presented sue of Film Culture Magazine in 1954. in 1958 he began writing his and his life with artists and beloved friends, such as Carolee Schneemann, at the Cinematheque. “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice, mostly covering indepen- Louise Bourgeois, Patti Smith, Marina Abromovic, Harmony Korine and dent, underground film, or what he called the New American Cinema. Ken and Flo Jacobs. He also has expanded his work into multi-monitor The Creation of SOHO was 100% George Maciunas’ idea and project. I would say, George film installations. The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center opened in Vilnius, was responsible for completely transforming downtown Manhattan. Before his untimely death In 1962, Mekas co-founded the Filmmakers’ Cooperative, an artist-run, Lithuania in 2007, where much of Mekas’ Fluxus art collection is displayed. he created 30 artists’ cooperative buildings that transformed the dilapidated 100 Hell’s Acres non-profit organization devoted to the distribution of avant-garde film as He continues to make video work and is currently preparing for numerous area into SOHO. When the idea caught fire and, after a long legal fight -- by George -- the area an alternative to the commercial movie system that they saw as “morally upcoming shows, such as a Paris exhibition of photo prints from Williams- was legalized for artists to live in, the idea exploded. Eventually it jumped over Canal Street and gave birth to Tribeca. So it’s all George. Eventually the project cost him his life. After he corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally burg, Brooklyn where he first lived in NY from 1949-52; an exhibition of Film still from “Report from Millbrook” by Jonas Mekas, 1966. boring”. In 1964, he founded the Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque, which even- installations, prints, and sound pieces and a premiere of his new film Out- was beat up by the mafia in one of the buildings, his health was never the same. Copyright Jonas Mekas, courtesy Anthology Film Archives. tually became Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s most important takes From the Life of a Happy Man at the Serpentine Gallery in London; centers for the preservation and exhibition of experimental and avant- and a film and video retrospective at BFI Southbank, London.Re:Voir What do you think of how SoHo has changed? garde cinema as an art form. In addition to contemporary independent film and agnès b. will be releasing a DVD box-set of Mekas’ films this year. I have been often been asked what would George think about SoHo, seeing what became and video, Anthology continuously screens the Essential Cinema Reperto- of his dream of cooperative artists lofts. He would hate it, they tell me. And I say, no no no 50 51 enough for me to want to film it, or - it’s not even wanting, it’s just I have to, I must, I’m driven always there, leading us… Suddenly we both had to stop to admire it.